eBay hurts my caveman brain

[prog]

Just took everything but the Wii game down from eBay. In the early part of the decade I was quite comfortable with eBay but I clearly don't understand this system any more; after four days my PS2 games each had zero bids but several "watchers". I am not sure what that means - I assume they were using an internal bookmarking service? - but whatever these "watchers" were doing they couldn't be bothered to make a $1 opening bid on any of the games, and that's just odious. No game for you. (Present company excluded, of course.)

The Wii game has nine watchers but three bids so that's OK. Seriously, though, is it just sniping? Has it advanced to such an art in the last few years that nobody bids like normal anymore?

This system would be less broken if any bid extended an auction's cutoff by an hour. I have been saying this for years. Bah.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Auctions are a game of information, where if you don't bid until the last minute you have the advantage of seeing everyone else's bidding behaviour, including increments and response times. Ergo, everyone snipes. The possibility of sellers withdrawing no-bid items adds an interesting twist, though.

The optimal (for some definition of "optimal") auction system is a blind auction in which the second-highest bid wins. This encourages buyers to estimate a consensus fair price, which people are extremely good at. And no one gives away any information to anyone else.

However, auctions like this don't make nearly such good spectacles as the early eBay auctions did, which I think was critical to the rapid growth of the company. In the early days it was dead fun watching the bidding, especially in the half hour before the end.

A system that extended the auction by an hour on every bid is an interesting idea, but it would be pretty susceptible to DDoS attacks. Anything that allows a third party to influence a transaction is a conduit to a protection racket, human beings what we are.